Mirkarimi wants to sit down with mayor for a public reconciliation

If San Francisco is worried about the budget, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi may have inadvertently come up with a way to put the city way, way in the black.

Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California Tuesday night, Mirkarimi said he finds it “awkward” that he and Mayor Ed Lee only “communicate through The Chronicle.”

The answer, he said, is for him to meet with the mayor in a public place before a live audience and hash out their differences.

“We can bring it down to a more human level,” the sheriff said.

Note to city Controller Ben Rosenfield: Sell tickets.

Ross Mirkarimi

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi thinks some one-on-one communication with Mayor Ed Lee would be a good thing. (Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle)

It’s been about five weeks since Mirkarimi got his job back after the Board of Supervisors refused to go along with Lee’s effort to oust him from office for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge resulting from a New Year’s Eve dispute with his wife, Eliana Lopez. But most of the questions the sheriff took still focused on that incident and its aftermath.

While Mirkarimi said he just wanted to move along with his job, there are “people who have a different motivation … they try to fan the flames.”

As he has since his guilty plea, Mirkarimi admitted that he had “acted in a way I should never have acted” and overreacted to his wife’s plan to take their son, Theo, to her native Venezuela for a long visit “out of fear and insecurity.”

While his wife and son are back in Venezuela right now, they will be back soon, he added.

Over the past months, he “has navigated the low points,” and learned things about himself that will help him as sheriff, Mirkarimi said.

“I recognize the principle of the power of redemption,” he said, which is important when it comes to keeping prisoners out of a revolving door to the prison system.

Effective rehabilitation and re-entry for prisoners should be the measure of his success as sheriff, Mirkarimi told the 100 or so people at the downtown event.

“It’s not whether murder is down or up or whether crime is down or up,” he said, “but are we improving lives? It’s a new metric.”

If the sheriff can deal with those prisoners properly, the crime rate will take care of itself.

“If crime is down, it’s because there are fewer repeat offenders,” Mirkarimi said. “I’d like to be a sheriff who builds fewer jails.”

Mirkarimi said much of what he wants to do is just a continuation of work of former Sheriff Mike Hennessey, who retired in January after 32 years in office. And there’s still plenty of tips he can pick up.

Hennessey’s low-key style, for example, “is something I should learn a little better.”